John Langan - The Fisherman

A neighbor passing by the house a few minutes later glances in a window and sees Jeffries standing with his head bowed, Helen seated in front of him. The neighbor doesn’t hear Helen saying anything to Jeffries, but he’s in a hurry to get someplace and doesn’t pay much attention. Whatever Miller Jeffries learns in the ten minutes he spends inside that house sends him out of it with more determination in his stride than anyone could recall him ever having shown. The corpse that occasioned his trip he leaves lying. He rides back to Woodstock, to the undertaker’s, where he has a small room at the back, as well as a shotgun no one knows about tucked under the mattress of his bed. He finds his boss bending over a body he’s almost done preparing for burial. As far as anyone can tell later on, there’s no dramatic confrontation, no melodramatic scene. Jeffries simply lifts the shotgun and blows a hole in the undertaker’s back. The impact bounces the man off the coffin he’s leaning over. As he lies there, Jeffries walks over to him and empties the shotgun’s remaining barrel into his groin. He reloads, and shoots the undertaker twice more, a second time in the groin, and once in the face. When he’s finished, he takes the horse and cart and returns to the camp, to the hospital, where his sweetheart is a nurse. He finds her talking to a patient, a man recovering from the flu, raises the shotgun, and shoots her through the heart. She collapses onto her patient’s bed, and that fellow will tell the reporters he was sure he was next, but Jeffries only looked at him with dull eyes, said, “She told me everything,” and turned the shotgun on himself.

It’s a pretty sensational event. The Catskills have seen their fair share of murders over the years — more, probably, than most folks realize — but this one causes a stir far and wide. There’s even a song written about it, “She Told Him Everything.” For a short time later that year, it enjoys a measure of success. Pete Seeger used to sing it once in a while. I think he recorded it, too. The song’s written from the point of view of Jeffries’s sweetheart, and portrays her as torn between two men, Jeffries, who’s cast as a kind of schoolgirl crush, and the undertaker, who’s presented as the girl’s true love. She wants to do right by Jeffries, but she can’t deny her feelings. Finally, she tells him, tells him everything, as the title says, and that’s that. Tragedy.

Obviously, there was something going on between Jeffries’s sweetheart and his boss. Well, he thought there was, at least. What the song misses is the source of Jeffries’s information. From his final words, the songwriter, following the newspapers, assumes that Jeffries learned of his sweetheart’s betrayal from her lips, that she confessed the whole thing to him. No one told the songwriter about Jeffries’s meeting with Helen. If they had, he might have penned a different song.

Lottie knows about that meeting, as do Clara and Rainer. For Lottie’s parents, there’s no doubting what happened. Helen told Miller Jeffries his sweetheart’s secret, and, in so doing, signed the death warrants for the girl and both her lovers. If they required any further proof of the urgency of the situation, this is it, in spades.

As it so happens, they’re going to receive still more evidence, whether they want it or not. While Rainer pores over his books late into the night, sleeping an hour, the dead woman continues her mischief. She isn’t around when the second undertaker comes from Wiltwyck for her husband’s body. I guess she had her fill of morticians. George’s mortal remains are carted off to Wiltwyck. I don’t know what becomes of him. Buried in a pauper’s grave, most likely. I think he’d drunk what little savings the family had. The children, though — whom I guess you’d have to call orphans, despite the fact that their mother was up and moving around — they receive another visit from Helen. The kids’ve stayed on at Italo and Regina’s, which is where their late mother finds them later the same day Miller Jeffries sends himself to his eternal reward. The day is just getting on to dusk. Italo is on his way home from work when he sees Helen ahead, lurching towards his house. Right away, he knows what she’s after, and, as he’ll tell Rainer the following morning, he’s simultaneously furious and afraid. Furious, because here’s the woman — the thing — that threatened his wife and children, not to mention the orphans, whom he’s already thinking of as his own. Afraid, because of the secret words she’s whispered through the door to Regina. He speeds up his pace, rushing past Helen to his house. Once inside, he doesn’t waste any time. He bolts the door and begins piling objects in front of it, the kitchen table, a trunk, a couple of chairs. The children he sends into the back room. Regina refuses to accompany them. I think she wants another crack at Helen.

They wait there behind Italo’s makeshift barricade, him clutching a hammer and chisel, Regina a cast-iron pan. His heart is pounding so hard he’s dizzy, Italo will report, and no doubt Regina felt the same. They wait there, and as the minutes drag by, they look at one another, confused. Granted, Helen moves slowly, but she should have been knocking on the door by now, uttering her request. Unless Italo was mistaken about her destination, which seems impossible. You know that line from the movies: “It’s quiet. Too quiet.” That’s how they feel. They wait, their nerves screaming with the strain. When they hear the crack at the back of the house, and the children shrieking, it’s almost a relief.

She went around the house, Helen, until she was outside the room where the children are huddled. She felt along the wall, and found a board that was loose and weak. While Italo and Regina stood ready at the front door, Helen worked her fingers under that loose board, gained a decent grip on it. She was quiet. None of the children noticed her fingers sliding steadily across the wood. None of them heard her easing the board back. It isn’t until she tears the board free, all at once, thrusting her arm inside and catching one of the children, Giovanni, by the hair, that the children are aware of their danger. Helen jerks her arm back, smashing Giovanni against the wall. She releases him, and he falls to the floor, motionless. She swipes at one of her own children, who dances away from her grip, and then she starts pressing on the board to the right of the one she ripped away. She’s coming in.

Before she can pry off that second board, however, Italo and Regina are in the room. The sight of their son lying in a heap on the floor tears a pair of wails from them, and they rush at the place where Helen has broken through, knocking over several of the children in their haste. Helen tries to withdraw her arm, but she isn’t fast enough, and hammer and pan blows rain down on it. More bones splinter and crack, one of them puncturing her white skin and spilling black blood. Italo stops his attack to grab Giovanni by his shirt and drag him out of harm’s reach, but Regina continues to pound Helen’s arm. When Italo relates these events to Rainer the following morning, Rainer will think that the sight of his wife’s fury unnerved his friend. By the time Regina pauses her assault long enough for Helen to draw her arm out, it isn’t so much an arm anymore as more of a flipper. Regina strikes the wall once, twice, screaming, “What words do you have for me now?” Helen doesn’t answer. Regina hits the wall a third time and throws the pan clattering down. She turns to tend Giovanni, who’s unconscious but alive, while Italo goes to check outside. He can think of few things he’s less inclined to, but he doesn’t know what else to do. Helen is gone. Italo follows the trail of her strange blood and muddy footprints out into the street, where it ceases, as if she’s walked off the earth.